All about Google Deep-Mind

Google Deep-mind is a British artificial intelligence company that created a neural network that learns how to play video games mimicking us humans. It has also developed a Neural Turing Machine, which is similar to a neural network that will have access an external memory like a normal Turing machine. This will create a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain, which is an incredible feat all by itself! The company also raised some eyebrows in 2016 after its AI Alpha-go beat a human professional Go player for the first time.

This company founded in September 2010 as Deep-mind Technologies. It was renamed as Google Deep-Mind when it was acquired by Google in 2014 for $500 million. The sale reportedly took place after negotiations led by Facebook to acquire Deep-Mind Technologies fell in 2013. It is told that one of the conditions the founders put for Google was that they must establish a Artificial Intelligence Ethics Board, but both the companies have since refused to reveal who sits on the board. Curiously Elon Musk is also an investor in the company, Mr. Musk has been conservative towards AI development.

Alpha-go

In October 2015, a computer  Go program called Alpha-go, powered by Deep-mind, beat the European Go champion Fan Hui, a 2 Dan  professional, five to zero. This is the first time an artificial intelligence (AI) defeated a professional player. Before this computers were only known to have played Go at “amateur” level. Go is considered to have much more moves than that of an average chess game. This was considered difficult for computers, because a traditional AI uses methods like brute-force technique. In March 2016 it beat Lee Sedol, a 9th Dan Go player and one of the highest ranked players in the world with a 4-1 in a five-game match.

AI has been largely about pre-programming certain tools for specific tasks. Here the intelligence of the system lies mostly in the smart human who programmed all of the intelligence into the system. We classify AI’s like Alpha-go as AGI or artificial general intelligence. These systems and tools are flexible enough and adaptive to learn. 

 

Google Deep-Mind recently announced a partnership with the NHS ’s Moorfields Eye Hospital. The partnership’s main agenda is to apply machine learning to spot common eye diseases earlier. This five-year research project will draw on one million anonymous eye scans which are held on Moorfields’ patient database. This will help in the complex and time-consuming process of analyzing eye scans.

The hope is that one day this will allow diagnoses of common causes of sight loss, like diabetic retinopathy and age-related ocular degeneration, to be recognized as soon as possible, so that it can be treated more effectively.

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A mobile app called “Streams” will provide the medical staff with latest clinical information. there are about two million people that are already living with sight loss in the UK. Google estimates that the number of people suffering from sight loss in the UK will double by 2050. Therefore improvements in detection and treatment would therefore improve the quality of life for large numbers of people in the UK and around the world.

 The new project will be dealing with two kinds of eye scans:

1. The traditional fundus images(these are essentially photographs of the retina at the back of the eye)
2. The optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans(these are cross-section images of the retina)

 

Since there is no way for researchers to identify individual patients, “explicit consent from patients for their data to be used in this way is not required,” the company said. In addition, all data will be destroyed at the end of the project. Throughout the project, the database will remain the property of Moorfields. However, “artificial intelligence software developed by Deep-mind during the research project is owned by Deep-mind and a licence is granted to use the data provided, only to the extent it is incorporated into any software developed from the research.”

However, as the Deep-mind site explains: “OCT scans are highly complex and require specialized training for doctors and other eye health professionals to analyse. As a result, there are often significant delays in how quickly patients can be seen to discuss their diagnosis and treatment. To date, traditional computer analysis tools have been unable to solve this problem.”

Even though Artificial Intelligence is said to make human life a lot easier, this make us humans overly dependent on machines. Since the screening of The Terminator movie there is a prevalent fear of Robots superseding humans, at a particular point of time the AI might regard humans as irreverent. AI is a powerful piece of software system, so the effects of it falling into wrong hands will be catastrophic.